An online journal of the nightly (and daily) nonsense endured by a (former) bouncer at two of New York's most popular nightclubs.

Saturday, August 06, 2011

Clarification

There seems to have been some confusion with this paragraph:

“This whole writing thing happened almost completely by accident. My life was pretty much a dead-end disaster when the whole job-blog-book movement came around, and I got lucky and caught a wave. The problem was that I thought I was entitled to something I didn’t deserve, and I acted accordingly – like a lazy piece of shit who (pardon the cliché) was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. Just ask my editor. That shit won’t happen again, believe me.”

By referring to the “writing thing,” I was talking about the process of starting a blog about bouncing, having it get discovered and then getting a book deal out of it. This all did, indeed, happen by accident. I took a bouncing job because I was having cash flow problems. I started a blog because a friend of mine enjoyed an email I wrote him about a guy beating off in the club. I got a book deal because Gawker discovered my blog and turned the right people onto it.

I didn’t want a bouncing job.

I didn’t know what a blog was, nor had I ever written anything other than a college term paper. I wrote for several years in obscurity because my friends seemed to enjoy it, and so did I.

I didn’t know what Gawker was.

To me, that’s accidental. And when I said “job-blog-book movement,” I wasn’t talking about my current job. I was talking about the trend, 5-6 years ago, of publishing houses giving book deals to job-bloggers and that fact that I managed to catch that wave, ride it, and have my 15 minutes of quasi-fame. Waiter Rant. New York Hack. Damien what’s-his-name, the investment banker. Melissa Lafsky. They all were part of the same group – people blogging anonymously about their jobs, then getting new jobs or lucrative book deals out of it.

So yeah, you convinced me to keep going and were largely responsible for me having my job today, but that’s not at all what the previous post was referring to. I started writing on my own in 2002, kept it up for several years while I was in my previous career, and lucked ass-backwardly into a book deal a full two years before you came into the picture. What came before it was all on me. I had the idea, I put in the work, and I was responsible. Nobody else, unless you want to count “Clint” for suggesting an idea he probably figured I’d drop after a week anyway.

Call me a “narcissist” all you want, but yeah, that whole thing was an “accident” where persistence – me continuing to maintain this site every day for three years even though nobody other than my friends was reading – met an amazing stroke of luck. I hadn’t even fucking met you yet, and you had nothing whatsoever to do with that.

I'll gladly give you credit where it's due (and have, with regard to my current job), but you're not getting credit for my book deal. I didn't even know you.

And I know exactly how this will go. Instead of reading this and understanding that you texted me a load of bullshit regarding something I wasn't even saying, you'll continue this theme as though this was yet another example of how I'm incapable of drawing even one correct breath in a fucking day.